> I'd love to see examples of what WebAssembly makes possible that wouldn't exist without it.

I've been playing with WebAssembly lately and the moment where it clicked for me how powerful it was was building an in-browser crossword filler (https://crossword.paulbutler.org/). I didn't write a JS version for comparison, but a lot of the speed I got out of it was from doing zero memory allocation during the backtracking process. No matter how good JS optimization gets, that sort of control is out of the question.

I also think being able to target the browser from something other than JS is a big win. 4-5 years is a long time for JS, but not a long time for language tooling; I feel like we're just getting started here.